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A curious brown envelope from the Toronto Police Service recently landed in the Star’s library. It contained Star negatives seized by warrant following a violent clash between police and anti-poverty activists at Queen’s Park — 12 years ago.

Fading fast as well — but not completely gone — is the police practice of seizing media images and footage.

With everyone walking around these days with a camera in their pocket, police are less likely to go through the trouble.

Mobile phone cameras with the ability to shoot high-quality images — plus the widespread practice of sharing on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — are making media images less valuable in investigations and prosecutions.

Police are asking witnesses to upload their images and video directly to their services’ websites, and they do.

On June 15, 2000, the first iPhone was seven years from its debut, and a protest at Queen’s Park organized by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty degenerated into a riot.

A few weeks later, police issued search warrants on 14 media outlets.

There was a media uproar and an unsuccessful court challenge. In the end, more than 40 people were charged, and media images and footage did play a role in some of the cases.

Skip ahead a decade to the hunt for vandals in the aftermath of the G20 Summit in Toronto. Police investigators solicited help from the public and were swamped with pictures and video — some 20,000 to 30,000 submissions. The service displayed a rogues’ gallery of those wanted on its website.

Police apparently felt no need to get warrants for media imagery. Certainly, some of what was published in the media did not help police at all, such as mages of police with no name tags beating protesters and, in a couple instances, targeting journalists.

Soon after the June 2 shooting at the Eaton Centre, which left two dead and five bystanders wounded, Toronto police posted an upload box on the home page of its website.

Technology advancements mean that a media “monopoly” on images and footage at major public events is over, says Pugash.

“When you think that at a major incident, where there can be tens of thousands of people with cameras, the dominance that traditional media used to have as being among the few people that actually had any kind of photographic images is now changed entirely.”

While media outlets have a number of very good reasons not to simply hand over pictures to police, the public, for the most part, does not. In fact, many want to help.

Following the 2010 post-Stanley Cup stupidity in Vancouver, disgusted citizens were quick to offer up their images.

“It was really interesting to see people who I don’t think would necessarily jump up and be so anxious to assist policing in any other context loving the opportunity to know that their photos were somehow germane,” says Lisa Taylor, a lawyer, journalist and law and ethics instructor at Ryerson University’s journalism school.

Vancouver police, however, also went after media images and footage. None of it was handed over before a legal fight and a court order.

The Canadian Association of Journalists was “outraged” by the warrants. At the same time media material was handed to police, the Vancouver Sun and the Province publicly posted all of the more than 5,000 images their photographers had shot of the riot.

To do — or be seen to be doing — the police’s bidding is bad for journalism on a couple of levels.

“It would not be good for our credibility with sources and the public if there was a perception that journalists did work for police,” says Kathy English, the Star’s public editor, who is also involved in training the paper’s newsroom hires.

“We always make it clear in training sessions that we are not to turn anything over to police. Toronto Star journalists don’t gather evidence for the police.”

Aside from the public service of publishing suspect information and police appeals for witnesses to come forward, most media outlets do not go any further to help police, and most, including the Star, have strict guidelines and policies regarding police requests for information, pictures and video.

“Star staff gather information for only one purpose: to publish in the Star,” reads the section in the Star policy manual dealing with search warrants.

“Just because the whole world is giving away their photos and are very quick to post their photos to a police website shouldn’t for a second lull journalists into forgetting what’s at stake here and why there has to be a bright line drawn between journalists and police and that we can’t just kind of give it up,” says Taylor.

The optics of helping police can also place journalists at risk.

Imagine being the photographer in the next violent protest following the one where the photographer’s employer handed over images to police with no questions asked and no court order to do so.

Even without a cosy relationship with police, people who carry big cameras — and they tend to be professional journalists — do attract the attention of those who would rather not be on the 6 o’clock news.

Protesters who used black bloc techniques at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the 2010 G20 were not at all fond of big cameras.

Look close at the photo accompanying this story of now-retired Spremo working the Queen’s Park riot. He took a few licks that day.

This raises an interesting question: with citizens offering police their own images of violent incidents, does that make anyone with a camera a potential target?

“I’m not aware of any incident where people who whip out a camera have been subjected to anything,” says Pugash. “Everybody has them, so I think it’s the ubiquity that almost guarantees that to be the case.”

As for the final question — why did police only now return the Queen’s Park negatives — turns out there is still an outstanding warrant for a person who is not Canadian, explains Irwin.

But over the years, all of the negatives were scanned by police and turned into digital files, making the negatives redundant.

The incentive for returning them, however, was a pending move of the Toronto police property unit, where evidence is stored. The unit is doing what anybody does when they move: getting rid of stuff that’s no longer needed.

The call went out to various units, including Irwin’s, to assess what was still absolutely necessary to keep. Irwin calls it an effort to “thin out the hoarding,” he laughs. “Because that’s what it is.”

The negatives are now back at the Star, where they belong, hoarded up with other relics of a paper business turning more and more to digital.

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